Mad Ones with Trust Funds

Andrew Martin’s new novel is a chronicle of the overeducated and underachieving stumbling through a post-pandemic haze.

By Adam StrausMarch 10, 2026

• Fiction

THE YOUNGEST MILLENNIAL turns 30 this year, while the oldest is now closer to 50 than 40. The 2020s have been tough sledding for those of us weaned on participation trophies and Obama-era optimism. Our circa-2010 special snowflake selves are now melted into puddles splashed beneath the jackboots of a neofascist future. Think of all that hope and change; now realize the first millennial to reach the White House is J. D. Vance.

In depicting this generational reality, Andrew Martin’s third book, Down Time (2026), operates less as a traditionally plotted novel than as a collection of interlocking portraits of low-functioning characters, loosely bound by acquaintance, romance, and the death of mutual friend Sam, “another brilliant, secretly rich punk gone from the world.” Most drink too much; some try not to. We open with Cassandra, who is picking up her boyfriend Aaron—a writer of “great skill and very modest sales in his one, slim story collection”—from rehab. Cassandra also gets the last word in the novel, over coffee with her friend Antonia, an academic whose second book, on narratives of environmental and cultural collapse, “could be made interesting and complicated enough to get her the right kind of attention” and a tenure-track job at Harvard. In between, we meet Malcolm—Cassandra’s high school classmate/ex and a marginally more successful writer than Aaron—who eventually marries Violet.

Like Martin’s debut novel Early Work (2018) or his follow-up story collection Cool for America (2020), Down Time once again focuses on a narrow band of class status and intellectual achievement. The most self-consciously poor character is Cassandra, the child of two “public school teachers […] She taught history at a Catholic prep school in a Boston suburb and made enough for normal human expenses.” Xavier, notable for his “intellectual shortcomings,” trades bon mots about a “post-suicide Rothko” in the halls of an upscale rehab facility after dropping out of Pomona College and Sarah Lawrence in turn. A devoted chronicler of the overeducated and underachieving, Martin is interested in those for whom the world is wide open, who by virtue of their birth circumstances, innate abilities, and elite educations seem capable of doing anything they want. They invariably fall short of that promise.

This might be a question of perspective, though. Among the central cast of five, it’s striking that Violet is the only one who does not merit any point-of-view chapters. Violet is a doctor, risking her life during the pandemic and griping to Malcolm about how their friends act “as if we were the only generation that had ever had to deal with difficult shit.” This relationship between a hapless male writer and a virtuous female doctor is reminiscent of Peter and Julia from Early Work, and of the three main characters in that novel, it is also Julia who never tells her story directly.

If the subject matter and prose style feel familiar to Martin’s readers, that’s because we’re in the same universe. Characters minor (Kenny and Thomas) and major (Leslie!) recur in minor cameos or passing mentions. While Down Time stands as a fully independent work, these connections allow Martin’s oeuvre to be read as a coherent whole, telling a generational story of our hazy twenties and thirties fading into, God forbid, our looming forties. It’s admirably audacious, but almost expected from an author who titled his first book Early Work.

What keeps Down Time from feeling like a retread is a new awareness of the wider world. It’s tempting to read this as a pandemic novel: Part I ends in March 2020, Part II covers the height of the lockdown, Part III follows the cautious reopenings of 2021, and Part IV arrives after “nearly two years of second-guessing every fucking social activity, then having half of them cancelled anyway.” But unlike, say, Gary Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends (2021) or Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables (2023), Down Time is more interested in what endured through the pandemic in bastardized forms than in what changed wholesale, more concerned with the liminal times before and after lockdown than with the starkest and darkest days of 2020. Malcolm, already depressed, develops “something more like psychosis.” Cynthia shares her music (and screams) on Zoom, leaving Antonia to wonder of the performance: “Did it make sense through a computer screen? Was there any chance of making a dent in whoever was out there?” Violet is most irrevocably altered by COVID-19, burned out by the endless horrors. Still, she keeps working at the hospital, albeit with reduced hours. Her situation reflects our (ongoing?) post-pandemic haze: the world is much like before, just a touch shittier in almost every way.

This is despite the moments in 2020 when it briefly seemed that real change might be possible. Bernie Sanders’s defeat in the Democratic primary haunts the novel, as ghostly a specter as Sam’s death. And like a ghost, politics hovers in the background of every scene without moving to the fore. It’s part of the setting, as in the final picture we see of Sam, “smoking a cigarette in a DSA t-shirt while squatting to pee in the snow.” Especially for those characters who spend the summer of 2020 in cities, protest is omnipresent, if not particularly potent. Malcolm admits that he “definitely caught the spirit for a little while. It was impossible not to in Brooklyn if you aren’t a total reactionary moron. But now, I don’t know, it feels like it’s becoming just another thing, a routine. I’m not sure it’s really doing anything.”

Being able to relegate politics to the backdrop of one’s life is an incredible privilege, of course. Writing about such privileged characters gives Martin wide leeway to comment on their world, which has largely foreclosed the opportunity for artistic and intellectual lives that are both meaningful and solvent. “It was fun to have come from money as long as you knew you didn’t deserve it,” Malcolm quips. But what does someone like Malcolm deserve? Better than the hackneyed fiction he has to write if he wants to publish, perhaps. When her tenure dreams fall apart, it’s Antonia who acknowledges that “no one deserved anything, but she’d briefly convinced herself that she was among the elect, brought forward by fate to be successful and happy.” By all measures, she should be: her academic work on narratives of ecological and cultural collapse sounds genuinely interesting, and she’s such an excellent teacher that observing her class fundamentally shifts Malcolm’s idea of what teaching even is. And to give an idea of Antonia’s milieu, her stepfather is the former governor of New Jersey. Still, when her teaching contract lapses after a seemingly anodyne interaction with an undergrad, her dreams of an academic career become “just another thing lost in this era of seemingly infinite decimation.”

If something survives the decimation, it’ll be art. An unbridled sense of creative mischief permeates Down Time, perpetrated by both the author’s sparkling prose and the characters themselves. In a section previously excerpted in The New Yorker, we meet Chelsea, “a sculptor who specialized in small, molded, plastic figurines engaged in hardcore, sometimes physically impossible, sex acts.” She and her partner Grant serve as the sole witnesses and guests at Malcolm and Violet’s wedding (“two more thirty-somethings from Brooklyn getting married in the Hudson Valley”). The presence of Chelsea and Cynthia, layered with marginally more buttoned-up artists like Aaron and Malcolm, buttressed by inventive academics and casual art historians like Antonia and Cassandra, serves to infuse the book with dynamism. Think Kerouac’s mad ones with trust funds, doing their best to make something meaningful in a meaningless world.

And their creativity extends to the bedroom. In Down Time, almost everyone is some combination of kinky and queer. But the uninhibited sexual exploration feels, at times, dystopic, almost reminiscent of Brave New World (1932). One of Malcolm’s main sexual activities is donning his pregnant wife’s “pink silk slip” and licking her legs while she reads; the other is sending “increasingly suggestive texts” to Antonia “until approximately the day Violet gave birth.” Aaron embarks on an all-consuming, relapse-inspiring gay romance with Xavier; afterward, “getting back into Cassandra’s good graces would require heroic effort, but he knew from past experience that, unfortunately for her, it was possible.” Everyone is fucking all the time, hating their partners, falling apart. Late in the novel, “Antonia considered the chain of people stretching across her recent life—Sam, Lev, Cynthia. Malcolm, in his way. The others she’d slept with or hoped after. They had taken up so much space. But what did you do with that accumulation? It didn’t seem to add up to enough.” It’s not that these characters lack options, sexually or in any other aspect of their lives; it’s just that their choices are all circumscribed or downright illusory, leading to the same fundamental unhappiness.

Don’t feel bad about enjoying Down Time, despite its often bleak outlook. The pleasure of this book comes from reading perfectly rendered sentence after perfectly rendered sentence. They’re hilarious sentences too; it’s no surprise to learn that Martin studied with Sam Lipsyte as an undergrad at Columbia, or to see Terry Southern Prize winner Ben Nugent named in the acknowledgments. Much of Martin’s comedic heavy lifting is done by brilliantly rendered side characters, such as Malcolm’s great-uncle Jim, a priest whom Malcolm remembers flirting with “my Jewish girlfriend when I was a teenager—‘Hey, my boss is Jewish!’” The humor also serves to flesh out the world of the novel, as when Thomas’s dad writes “a government thriller, […] and the villain is definitely Marxism. And the CDC.” But some of the funniest moments are simple raunch. My first of many laughs out loud came when I read that Aaron “could dreamily recall the details of particular blow jobs the way some people recounted meals at great restaurants.”

Maybe it’s immature of me to find that line as funny as I do. I’m in my thirties, after all, peering into the abyss of “real” adulthood, like Martin’s characters. There are hints of a new future lurking; the last we hear of Malcolm, he’s “applying for a job at his and Cass’s old prep school, something he’d previously said he would contemplate only if he had a traumatic brain injury.” But what is growing up if not being battered about the head until you think differently? Whatever their lives might eventually come to resemble, it’s easy to imagine this endlessly entertaining ensemble expanding and reconnecting, intersecting with Martin’s previous books and paving the way for his next ones.